Two centuries after the Lewis and Clark expedition trekked through the unexplored West to Oregon, a group is looking for the descendants they left behind. They could number in the thousands today, but the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery Descendant Project wants to publish a genealogical catalog of every descendant of the 34 members of the famed expedition, including descendants of brothers, sisters and even cousins of expedition members. The deadline: Dec.

With an archivist for a mother, Emily Reid has grown up immersed in other people's histories. She traipsed through cemeteries at 3, and learned to look up other people's birth and death certificates on microfilm as soon as she could read. It wasn't until she came across the name William Fuqua, though, that history came alive for her. Assigned as a high school freshman to research her family tree, Emily discovered that she was related to Fuqua, a French Huguenot farmer.

Two tablespoons of blood drawn from each of 100,000 volunteers will soon help Brigham Young University researchers create a DNA database and trace family trees back 15 generations. Officials with the high-tech genealogy project have traveled to Southern California several times during the last year to collect blood from locals who can trace their family histories back at least four generations.

Long before there was the census in China, there were the genealogy records. Every family had one, from the emperor to the poorest peasant. Like time capsules, these private archives captured vital statistics about the life and times of a family's ancestors. After the Communists took over in 1949, tens of thousands of these family dossiers were destroyed as vestiges of a backward-looking feudal society. Now China's most modern city is racing to rescue what's left of these ancient manuscripts.

The Mormon Church will release a CD-ROM containing records from a post-Civil War bank used by ex-slaves, offering many blacks a first chance to trace their family histories, church officials in Salt Lake City said. Before the Civil War, documents were not kept on blacks, making it much more difficult for blacks to trace the history of their relatives than it is for whites. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long compiled exhaustive genealogical data.

When a relative told Marjorie Sholes-Higgins of her grandfather's vast family, she decided it was time to explore her past and dig deeply into her African American roots. Sixteen years and 1,379 relatives later, she is amazed at the complexity of what she found. It is both an epic tale that unfolds on three continents and a personal story of struggle and survival. "All that from one man," she said.

Researchers hope to use DNA to link people with no recorded family history to their ancestral homelands. Brigham Young University's multimillion-dollar "molecular genealogy" project aims to blend traditional genealogy with cutting-edge DNA technology. To do this, researchers at the university are taking blood samples from 100,000 volunteers. Along with those genetic fingerprints, volunteers are asked to provide a family tree stretching back at least four generations.

The search for the past can require the patience of a gold miner, swirling and sifting the silt. Then, suddenly, there's a glint of precious material. Carmen Brussard's hundreds of hours hunched over microfiche ultimately led to this stunning discovery: She and her husband, who met at a dance in Los Angeles 34 years ago, are not the first joint love story from their respective families.

In her younger days, she was a political radical who couldn't hold a job, a civil rights lawyer's daughter who was disgusted by the oppression of American blacks and intrigued by their stories. Now 71 and a retired history professor, Gwen Midlo Hall is on a mission to shed light on America's slaves and their personal histories through thousands of pages of handwritten, colonial-era documents salvaged from courthouse basements across Louisiana and as far away as France and Spain.

Cozkacuauhtli Zenteotl was once known as Eduardo Rivera. For 18 years, he didn't think much about his name until one day he realized that, unlike many of his white and African American classmates, he knew very little about his family's history. "Their roots went back to Europe and Africa," he said. "But me? I did not know how I came about."